Monday, April 4, 2011

In Shakespeare

Here's a beautiful poem by James Richardson, with his signature mix of apparently casual wit turning effortlessly into something darker and incisive. This is from THE NEW YORKER, back in February 0f 2007, but I ran across it just today and found it so pleasurable and so acute that I wanted to post it here.

IN SHAKESPEARE

In Shakespeare a lover turns into an assas you would expect. People confusetheir consciences with ghosts and witches.Old men throw everything awaybecause they panic and can’t feel their lives.They pinch themselves, pierce themselves with twigs,cliffs, lightning, and die—yes, finally—in glad pain.

You marry a woman you’ve never talked to,a woman you thought was a boy.Sixteen years go by as a curtain billowsonce, twice. Your children are lost,they come back, you don’t remember how.A love turns to a statue in a dress, the statuecomes back to life. Oh God, it’s all so realisticI can’t stand it. Whereat I weep and sing.

Such a relief, to burst from the theatreinto our cool, imaginary streetswhere we know who’s who and what’s what,and command with Metrocards our destinations.Where no one with a story struggling in himconvulses as it eats its way out,and no one in an antiseptic corridor,or in deserts or in downtown darkling plains,staggers through an Act that just will not end,eyes burning with the burning of the dead.